Christ Over Us: An Example of Submission and Mission
In the context of a new Christendom (inaugurated with the Edict of Milan?), the identity of the church as a community of "exiles and strangers in the world" changed. With the so-called "Constantinian shift," the church took on a new social and political status, which, as many of the radical reformers argued, has since redefined the purpose and nature of the church.
In particular, in so far as the church and state were politically united, the function of the two became mutually commensurate. Namely, the church's purpose was reframed as a bureaucratic mission of increasing membership and overseeing the welfare of its members.
And it's easy to see how this would happen. In Christendom, where everyone is presumably "Christian" by virtue of their familial and national heritage, the identity of the church as "disciples of Jesus" was obscured; and its mission of making new disciples was therefore compromised. The confusion was only exacerbated by the paedobaptisic practice of the Catholic and Reformational churches, in, wittingly and unwittingly, christening the children of unbelievers en masse. This is, of course, the subject of Kierkegaard's insightful, if blistering, Attack on Christendom. But, even practiced evangelically with due caution, when baptizing infants becomes the primary means of discipleship, the Great Commission has been essentially lost.
Two things had deeply challenged the church in its "long and dangerous sleep": 1) the recovery of the gospel in the reformation, and, as a result 2) the realignment of the church along evangelical lines. Nevertheless, even with the evangelical demand for spiritual regeneration, as evidenced by faith and repentance, and an evangelical theology of the sacraments (predicated on sola fide), the ecclesiology of the magesterial reformers was, at best, quasi-evangelical. The church was still understood as a national body of adherents, comprehended within their sociological matrix. Blood and soil. Even in the Westminster Standards, where the "visible church" transcends the soil of the state, it is nevertheless delineated along blood lines (WLC 62). And so, strangely, baptism could be applied and received apart from faith - provided one had "Abraham for our father," Lk.3:8. As a result, an uneasy mixture of flesh and Spirit, of birth and rebirth persisted within the ecclesiology of the reformational churches.
Moreover, the instrumentality of the church as the divine agent of salvation in the world was effectively reduced to the traditionally sacerdotal functions of official teaching and preaching, administration of the sacraments, and the exercise of church discipline (see Calvin's Institutes, Book IV). But what of the multifarious gifts and ministries of the broader body? The priesthood of all believers, it would appear, was practically negated in the context of the church's task of making disciples. And so, from the beginning, a new priesthood was engendered within the Protestant clergy.
Perhaps if Calvin had expanded his explanation of 'the discipline of the church' beyond ecclesiastical censure, as Dallas Willard has suggested in The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988, pp.145-146), entailing all that the church does and is as a body of disciples (e.g., Mt.18:6-35; cf. Eph.4:2-5:21), then a more comprehensive understanding of the church's mission and function would have followed. As it was, however, the purpose of the church was effectively limited to the purview of its leadership, and that, primarily, with respect to its role of increasing church membership (typically, the old-fashioned way: making babies...not that there's anything wrong with that!) and overseeing the welfare of its members.
And thus it stands today. The response of many young and frustrated men of zeal has been to break away from the church altogether, in function if not in attendance, in order to pursue the Great Commission, as they understand it. On the one hand, this is understandable, as the lumbering, traditional churches became bogged down in the machinary of their own bureaucracies. On the other hand, however, such a departure represents a profound confusion of the mission itself. The mission cannot be accomplished apart from the church (not in part only, but in its entirety); for that is how God has designed it. The mission is for the church and by the church. FUBU, baby...
As American Christianity moved away from the state church, it also tended to marginalize the church per se in the life of faith. Church participation was expected by the pious, but, practically speaking, hardly necessary. Yet in failing to submit ourselves to the church (not necessarily any particular church, but some particular church!), we fail to submit ourselves to Christ in the accomplishment of his mission. Perhaps we should add to the list of reformational solas: sola ecclesia?
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Fleshing this Out...
Christ Over Us: An Example of Submission and Mission
It seems to me that the Western church has functioned with a radically flawed ecclesiology - a systemic error that has to yet to be thoroughly uprooted.
The Nicean and Post-Nicean fathers essentially established the doctrines of theology proper and Christology, over and agaist the heresies of Gnosticism, Arianism, and the various confusions regarding Christ's Person. Likewise, the reformers of the 16th century clearly articulated the doctrines of soteriology and the efficacy of Christ's mediation, over and against the semi-Pelagianism and sacerdotal hierarchy of Rome. In this, the reformers unearthed Augustine's doctrines of grace, as obscured in the scholastics. And in their radical, Christocentric iconoclasm, they cleared the cluttered halls of the church, and reset the evangelical trajectory, in which the word of God (and the gospel in particular) is properly located at the center of the church's life and mission.
Yet, the reformers never worked out a consistently evangelical ecclesiology. Despite their profound grasp of the fundamentals (e.g., the recovery of the priesthood of all believers, and the clarion call of sola Scriptura), there is still, it seems to me, a deep confusion evident in Luther, in the Anglican synthesis, and even in Calvin's "Geneva experiment". One example of such confusion, I would argue, is the reformers' continued practice of infant baptism. This is particularly clear in Zwingli's idealized nationalism, as articulated against the anabaptists' "insurrectionist" practices in Zurich: 're'-baptizing one another in their own homes! After all, the failure to 'register' one's children with the state through the baptismal rite of the Swiss Church was just unpatriotic. Calvin advanced Zwingli's paedo-baptistic arguments with a more developed, covenantal theology; yet the conflation of church and state persisted in his identifying 'familial solidarity' with "covenant community" - our corporate solidarity with Christ through faith. At root, there was a failture to disentangle the church, as a spiritual entity, from the geo-political entities of Europe. Perhaps this was just too inconceivable for the "magesterial reformers," who, unlike the poor anabaptists, found themselves on the right end of Christendom's sword (at least within their respective territories).
Yet, in the case of the "American experiment," an essentially anabaptist ecclesiology won the day, and the first amendment has enshrined this political and ecclesiological distinction ever since. Was the American church then on the right path?
It seems not. Or at least, the path has been less than straight. In its modern American forms, evangelicalism has tended to neglect the church altogether. Our reformational theology, it would seem, could not sustain us, apart from a state church. But then again, in perhaps different ways, neither could it sustain continental Europe or Great Britian, with a state church! Rather than placing the blame at the feet of our anabaptistic and puritancial heritage, then, I think that our profound neglect of the church betrays a deeper inadequacy in our Western ecclesiology, bequethed to us all, as children of the reformation. It would be easy to blame secularism in all of this. But I am afraid that the fault lies more squarely with us.
I do think Europe's strident secularism, though similiar, is a different beast than the American version. Nevertheless, the same problem, I believe, lies at the root of both: a failure on our part to understand the relationship between the church, the Christian, and the mission of Christ.
To be continued...
It seems to me that the Western church has functioned with a radically flawed ecclesiology - a systemic error that has to yet to be thoroughly uprooted.
The Nicean and Post-Nicean fathers essentially established the doctrines of theology proper and Christology, over and agaist the heresies of Gnosticism, Arianism, and the various confusions regarding Christ's Person. Likewise, the reformers of the 16th century clearly articulated the doctrines of soteriology and the efficacy of Christ's mediation, over and against the semi-Pelagianism and sacerdotal hierarchy of Rome. In this, the reformers unearthed Augustine's doctrines of grace, as obscured in the scholastics. And in their radical, Christocentric iconoclasm, they cleared the cluttered halls of the church, and reset the evangelical trajectory, in which the word of God (and the gospel in particular) is properly located at the center of the church's life and mission.
Yet, the reformers never worked out a consistently evangelical ecclesiology. Despite their profound grasp of the fundamentals (e.g., the recovery of the priesthood of all believers, and the clarion call of sola Scriptura), there is still, it seems to me, a deep confusion evident in Luther, in the Anglican synthesis, and even in Calvin's "Geneva experiment". One example of such confusion, I would argue, is the reformers' continued practice of infant baptism. This is particularly clear in Zwingli's idealized nationalism, as articulated against the anabaptists' "insurrectionist" practices in Zurich: 're'-baptizing one another in their own homes! After all, the failure to 'register' one's children with the state through the baptismal rite of the Swiss Church was just unpatriotic. Calvin advanced Zwingli's paedo-baptistic arguments with a more developed, covenantal theology; yet the conflation of church and state persisted in his identifying 'familial solidarity' with "covenant community" - our corporate solidarity with Christ through faith. At root, there was a failture to disentangle the church, as a spiritual entity, from the geo-political entities of Europe. Perhaps this was just too inconceivable for the "magesterial reformers," who, unlike the poor anabaptists, found themselves on the right end of Christendom's sword (at least within their respective territories).
Yet, in the case of the "American experiment," an essentially anabaptist ecclesiology won the day, and the first amendment has enshrined this political and ecclesiological distinction ever since. Was the American church then on the right path?
It seems not. Or at least, the path has been less than straight. In its modern American forms, evangelicalism has tended to neglect the church altogether. Our reformational theology, it would seem, could not sustain us, apart from a state church. But then again, in perhaps different ways, neither could it sustain continental Europe or Great Britian, with a state church! Rather than placing the blame at the feet of our anabaptistic and puritancial heritage, then, I think that our profound neglect of the church betrays a deeper inadequacy in our Western ecclesiology, bequethed to us all, as children of the reformation. It would be easy to blame secularism in all of this. But I am afraid that the fault lies more squarely with us.
I do think Europe's strident secularism, though similiar, is a different beast than the American version. Nevertheless, the same problem, I believe, lies at the root of both: a failure on our part to understand the relationship between the church, the Christian, and the mission of Christ.
To be continued...
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